Nice Work

Vic Wilcox, the managing director of a struggling engineering firm, is thrown together with leftist feminist professor Robyn Penrose, leading to clashes over just about everything and eventually an understanding of sorts

His tongue caustic, and his take on British society provocative and funny, Lodge skewers virtually every aspect of Thatcherite Britain in this top-notch satirical novel, a sequel to Small World . Set in an industrial city in the Midlands, the story's protagonists are Vic Wilcox, managing director of a failing engineering firm, and Robyn Penrose, temporary lecturer in English lit at the University of Rummidge. Robyn is chosen to "shadow" Vic at the factory one day a week, as part of a program to effect a liaison between the university and local industry. A "trendy leftist feminist" with highfalutin views about the evils of industrial capitalism, Robyn looks down on Vic, whose education is scanty and whose lifestyle is diametrically opposed to hers. Gradually, however, the two acquire a grudging respect for each other and, as the plot becomes agreeably convoluted, the pragmatic engineer (whose criterion is "who pays?") and the pedantic literary critic change places on fortune's ladder. Scarcely anything escapes Lodge's scorn--from business ethics to academic fustian--but the satire is never excessive. To be published simultaneously with an earlier work, Out of the Shelter (Penguin paperback), this lively comic novel--short-listed for last year's Booker Prize--is the perfect book to introduce Lodge to those American readers not yet acquainted with his work.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Robyn Penrose is a lecturer in 19th-century literature at a university located in the fictitious English Midlands city of Rummidge. Vic Wilcox is managing director of Pringle's, an industrial casting company located in a grimy suburb. They are thrown together as part of a "shadow scheme" concocted by their superiors in response to a governmentally ordained "Industry Year." Entering into the arrangement with considerable skepticism and lack of appreciation for the other's mode of life, they get off to a rocky start, but then slowly develop a mutual respect and even liking for each other (and in Vic's case something more). Nice Work is, indeed, a "nice" novel. Lodge spoofs in a nonjudgmental way both the pretensions of academia and the materialism of the upper-middle business class. While lacking in stylistic elegance, this is a well-told tale full of gentle humor that should, despite its setting, have broad appeal to Americans.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.